Joan Hawkins drove her late-model Prius into her subdivision after work on a early December evening. The sun had already set and her neighborhood was quite dark. She could see the bluish flickers of her neighbors who had already started watching TV. It had been a long day at her job as an administrator at the local community college and she was looking forward to a quiet evening, perhaps with a couple of very dry martinis.
She was in early sixties and kept herself in good shape. She had been divorced ten years earlier (it should have been twenty years earlier she told her friends). At five-four, one-thirty, with blue eyes and grayish-white hair she kept in a Hillary Clinton look she still thought of herself as an attractive woman. Every now and then, someone at the college would try to fix her up with someone. They usually turned out to be losers, just like her ex-husband.
Joan was wearing a yellow lambswool cardigan, a white blouse, a knee-length black woolen skirt, black thigh-high stockings, and black knee-high leather boots. After she had pulled her car into her garage and pushed the button on the remote to lower the garage door, she gathered up her big purse and her laptop case and opened up the door that led into her kitchen.
She had only taken a couple of steps before a leather-gloved hand covered her mouth and she felt a sharp poke in her back.
"MMPPPPHHH!!!" she yelped.
"Just be quiet," a low, authoritative voice told her. "Feel that in your back?"
Joan nodded.
"If you don't cause me any trouble, you won't get hurt. Understand?"
She nodded again.
"I'm just your run-of-the-mill burglar and, unfortunately for you, you have waltzed in here before I was done helping myself to your stuff. I'm going to have to tie you up but, if you are a good girl, you'll be fine and you'll be able to call your insurance company pretty quickly. OK?"
Joan managed a shaky sound into the burglar's hand and nodded her head in meek compliance. The man was obviously bigger and stronger than her and she knew she had little choice but to obey.
"Good," the man said and slid both her purse and her laptop bag off her shoulders and onto the floor while keeping his hand over her mouth.
"Now, open up," he ordered and when Joan obeyed, some kind of cloth went into her mouth.
"Keep it there," she was told and she felt her sweater-covered arms pulled behind her and first, she felt, then she heard handcuffs being placed around her wrists and locked in place.
She was spun around and saw that her captor was a tall, thin man dressed entirely in black, from some kind of soft-soled shoes up through a black woolen ski cap that he had pulled over his face. All Joan could see, in her excited, frightened state, were his blue eyes.
He reached into his pocket and came out with a small roll of silver duct tape. He tore off a six-inch long strip and placed it over Joan's lips. Then he repeated the process, smoothing out the strips of tape with a couple of surprisingly gentle strokes of his fingers.
"My, my," he said, laughing. "You are pretty good-looking—for an older woman that is."
Joan's eyes widened involuntarily and she wriggled and squirmed in his grasp causing him to laugh again. "Don't bother my dear," she was told, "I'm in charge here and you will do what I want."
He half-dragged her over to her couch and sat her down, again, rather gently she thought. He knelt down in front of her and, surprising her once again, proceeded to take off her leather knee-high boots.
"All the better to tape your ankles together," he told her. "Sorry about the stockings though. I am afraid they won't be much good after the tape comes off."
He then brought her purse over to the couch and rifled through it, extracting her cash and then examining her driver's license.
"Pleased to make your acquaintance, Ms. Joan Hawkins," he said. "And, of course, thank you for your cash, your jewelry and whatever else I decide to take with me."
He looked her up and down, causing her to avert her gaze. He stood up and told her, "Nice sweater and even nicer breasts underneath the wool."
All Joan could do was make a few feeble sounds into her gag as the burglar caressed her shoulders and then her breasts.
"Don't go anywhere Joan," he said, laughing once again. "I'll be back in a little while."
Joan squirmed in frustration on the couch as she heard the burglar's footsteps above her in her bedroom. She knew she was totally helpless. There was no escape from the combination of the handcuffs and the tape that bound her legs together. The gag was more than effective and, she realized in dismay as her tongue probed the cloth stuffing, that a pair of panties, perhaps even her own, were preventing her from crying for help.
She then realized that she had a glimmer of hope. Her cell phone was still in her purse which was only a couple of feet away from her on the couch. She slid over to the purse and tried to work her fingers into the purse.
She grunted into her gag with the effort and, after a minute or two of trying, felt her fingers touch the phone. Unfortunately, at the moment, the burglar came down the stairs.
"Well, well," he said, in a calm voice as he took the purse away from her, "aren't you the feisty one. But, my dear, I am afraid that means your bondage will have to be ratcheted up some. After all, there are consequences to our actions aren't there."
Joan stared at him, wondering what exactly he meant.
